In the second chapter of 'Black Skin, White Masks' (BSWM), “The Women of color and the white man” (1967[1952]), Frantz Fanon makes some assertions about black Martiniquais women that gained him the criticism of some feminist theorists as a misogynist. Fanon will find in the expressed xenocentrism or malinchismo of black Martiniquais women a perhaps radical expression of the “dependency complex” he will attempt to document for Negroes in general. Reading Fanon against the backdrop of a Caribbean literary tradition of romantic novels, it is hoped, will help achieve two things: placing Fanon’s writing in the cultural and geo-political context in which it was produced, and where his statements about female malinchismo can be read in a new light; and consequently, pointing to the pitfalls of the feminist critique of Fanon as misogynist. The election of reading Fanon against a fictional literary tradition seems justified by the fact that Fanon himself would recur to a novel, Mayotte Capécia’s 'Je suis Martiniquaise' (1948), as a paradigmatic example of the phenomenon of malinchismo that he was trying to document.
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